Ry – Teacher to Counselor: a Personal Journey
“So when I was a kid, when I was really young, I wanted to be a teacher. My mom was a teacher for my whole life,” Ry explained. “I spent a lot of time in her classroom.”
You probably know Ry. He walks the hall confidently, his air of authority pleasantly combined with a strong sense of empathy and understanding of and for the high school community. However, Ry has a story, a path that led him here to Trillium, as unique as any of the other high school staff. Trillium is a special place, and not very many people happen upon us randomly.
Ry moved to Portland in the summer of 2015 and started working at Trillium that same year as a teacher in the middle school. However, we now know him as a student support specialist for the whole upper school, which is a drastically different position. I interviewed Aryn, who attended middle school at Trillium last year and now is a Freshmen in high school, as well as Ry himself to discover what led to this change of positions.
“Last year it was hard to talk to him,” Aryn said of Ry as a teacher in the middle school.“Now that he doesn’t have classes to teach, it’s easier.”
“He taught science and advisory and I was in his science class, which was the last period of the day,” Aryn said. “Science was pretty fun, I do miss it a bit. It was like my favorite class to go to.” He described his first impression of Ry, “When he first came to the school I felt very happy and very enthusiastic because I’ve never had a transgender teacher before and having a teacher that could relate to me and a teacher that knows the struggles was a lot easier for me.” Aryn concluded with a smile and a shrug, “I knew that if anyone said anything in his class that was transphobic, I knew he’d be right on the dot. No questions asked, and he would tell them that’s not okay.”
Aryn described Ry’s job change as “A bit of a transition” because he was used to having Ry as a teacher. “I think that mostly he switched jobs because people felt like he was a good person to talk to.” Aryn said. “Now I feel like I can talk to him whenever I have an issue without taking time away from his students.”
When Ry came to Portland, he learned about Trillium from a friend who encouraged him to try to get a job here. He said of his work in the middle school: “Teaching in the middle school was chaotic. The kids are at that age where they’re not quite as mature as high schoolers, but they want all the independence of a high schooler. So it’s a very challenging age to teach.”
"I’m always impressed with how intelligent you all are." – Ry
When I asked Ry what made him interested in changing positions, he thought and then said, “I realized I spent a lot of my time talking one-on-one with students. Like, I was using my prep periods to talk with students, I was using my lunch periods to talk with students and I felt like I wasn’t even able to teach my academic content as much as I would have hoped to because I was talking with students so much.”
Ry explained that part of his job was about student support, something he has always loved, but part of it was actually to help the teachers. “My position was new this year - the student support specialist - and so I thought that, in that role, I could make the Middle school teachers’ jobs easier, by stepping into this role as someone who knows what it’s like and what is needed.”
I asked him if his position was different and he laughed. He said, “It’s so different.” He said that of course, it was fundamentally different because he was working with both middle school and high school. But he also explained that it was a very different experience day to day.
“Before I was teaching the same lesson every day. And on the one hand, that was…. It was really great because there was less spontaneity in my day. I got to work on something and improve it. Now, it’s like everything…. I don’t know what’s gonna happen any day that I come into the building. Any day I could have a plan for how I think my day’s gonna go and it could go completely different.”
He told me as well that he is now part of administration, which is a new feeling for him. “Anyone who knows me, knows that I’m super personable and I like to have fun.” he said. “I’m having less fun with the kids. Not that I’m having less fun in my job, but that I’m having less fun with the kids.”
He lamented how that now that he’s the student support specialist, ”I’m the person they call if there’s a crisis.” he reflected that he still has fulfilling relationships with his students but they’re less focused on fun and entertainment. “They all seem to carry baggage, instead of laughter.”
When asked what his favorite age to teach was he said he wasn’t sure. Then he added, “The conversations I get to have with the high school students are really… like I’m always impressed with how intelligent you all are, and how, like, introspective you are. And those tend to be the most fulfilling conversations I have.”